Two Men Wrote ‘Messiah.’ You Know One of Them.

When Charles Jennens, a wealthy art collector, first heard the work we now refer to as Handel’s “Messiah” in 1743, a year after it premiered, he came away thoroughly miffed. “I don’t yet despair of making him retouch the ‘Messiah,’” Jennens wrote to a friend, imagining his own suggestions for revisions to a work that is now inseparable from the holiday season.

Handel was Britain’s foremost public composer and court musician to George II. But it turns out that “Messiah” wasn’t really Handel’s — or at least not only his. It was born of one of the least recognized partnerships in music history but one of significant artistry, the Enlightenment-era equivalent of George and Ira Gershwin or Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Handel wrote the music but the original idea and the libretto — “the book” as it would be called on Broadway — belonged wholly to Jennens.